Tree Nut Farming in the United States (NAICS 111335)

An investor's primer. NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System, the U.S. government's standard for grouping businesses; the 2022 revision defines code 111335 as establishments primarily engaged in growing tree nuts — almonds, pistachios, walnuts, pecans, filberts (hazelnuts), and macadamias [1].

1. Overview

Tree nut farming is the business of growing permanent orchard crops — almonds, pistachios, walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, and macadamias — that take years to plant and then bear for two decades or more. It is a small slice of U.S. agriculture by farm count but a high-value one: utilized U.S. tree nut production was worth roughly $9.4 billion in 2024, up about 15% from 2023 [2][3]. The industry is overwhelmingly a California story — almonds, pistachios, and walnuts are grown almost entirely in the state's Central Valley — with pecans adding a Southern/Southwestern footprint and hazelnuts an Oregon one [3][4].

Two things make the economics distinctive. First, it is a commodity price-cycle business layered on top of appreciating, water-fed farmland: owners earn from the annual crop and from the rising value of scarce irrigated land, and both swing hard. Second, it is long-duration and illiquid — an orchard is a multi-year capital asset that cannot be rotated out of when prices fall. Almond grower prices ran from roughly $4 a pound in 2014 down to about $1.40 in 2022 before a partial recovery [12].

There is no pure-play U.S. tree-nut grower on a public stock exchange. The purest economics sit in private hands (The Wonderful Company), in a grower cooperative (Blue Diamond), and with institutional farmland owners. Public-market investors reach the industry indirectly — through farmland real estate investment trusts (REITs) that own orchards, a downstream nut processor, and diversified land/ag companies. Private investors can own orchards directly, buy into farmland funds, or back processing and water infrastructure. The strongest returns tend to belong to operators with secured water, efficient orchards, reliable processing access, and differentiated customers — not simply to whoever owns the most acres.

2. What it is and how it's structured

In scope (NAICS 111335): establishments primarily growing tree nuts — almond, pistachio, walnut, pecan, hazelnut (filbert), and macadamia farming [1]. The defining trait is that these are perennial crops: an orchard is a sunk, multi-year capital asset, not an annual planting.

The value chain runs in four stages, and ownership of each can sit in different entities:

1. Orchard ownership and cultivation.
2. Harvesting, hulling, drying, and initial sorting.
3. Shelling, grading, optical sorting, pasteurization, roasting, and ingredient production.
4. Branded retail, foodservice, industrial ingredients, and exports.

What it excludes (adjacent NAICS codes):

• Peanut farming is not here — peanuts are a legume field crop under NAICS 111992 (Peanut Farming), not a tree nut.
• Mixed fruit-and-nut farms where no single crop family is at least half of production fall under NAICS 111336 (Fruit and Tree Nut Combination Farming), and other orchards (citrus, non-citrus fruit) have their own codes within the 1113 "Fruit and Tree Nut Farming" group [1].
• Processing, shelling, and roasting nuts is manufacturing — NAICS 311911 (Roasted Nuts and Peanut Butter Manufacturing) — not farming. This matters: much of the industry's branded value (Blue Diamond, Wonderful, Fisher) is created downstream of the orchard.
• Support activities like custom harvesting and hulling fall under NAICS 115113 / 1151 (Support Activities for Crop Production).

Ownership mix: a broad base of family farms, partnerships, and mid-size operations at the growing end, feeding a concentrated handling/marketing tier. Almost all California almonds move through a handful of handlers — the Blue Diamond Growers cooperative (owned by ~3,000 growers), The Wonderful Company, and Olam, among the largest. The field is fragmented; the marketing channel is not.

3. How big it is

Our federal ground-truth figure. The only industry-specific number in our ingested federal file is the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) 2023 size standard: a tree nut farm counts as "small" if its average annual receipts are $3.75 million or less [5]. That is a small-business eligibility threshold, not a measure of industry revenue or market size — but the fact that it captures the vast majority of growers signals how many modest family orchards sit beneath the few giants.

Our ground-truth file contains no total industry revenue, employment, establishment count, or aggregate farm-sales figure for 111335, so none is asserted here. The scale figures below come from external federal commodity data (USDA) and should be read as indicators, not a clean NAICS total.

A note on the value figures: the ~$5.7B almond and ~$2.05B pistachio values above are national utilized-production values on a marketing-year basis. NASS's separate California calendar-year crop reporting runs somewhat higher — roughly $6.2 billion for almonds (2.725 billion pounds shelled) and $2.5 billion for pistachios (1.10 billion pounds in-shell) in 2024 — because it measures a different window and geography [8]. Both are real; the gap is measurement basis, not a factual dispute.

The undercount caveat — read this. Standard federal business-establishment counts badly understate this industry because they largely exclude crop production. The Census Bureau's Statistics of U.S. Businesses (SUSB) excludes crop production, and Nonemployer Statistics list crop and animal production as exceptions [7][9]. The right lens is the USDA Census of Agriculture, which counts any operation that produces and sells (or normally would sell) at least $1,000 of product [6]. By that measure the 2022 Census found 8,586 almond farms, 19,056 pecan farms, and 6,880 English-walnut farms — tens of thousands of tree-nut operations nationally, plus pistachio, hazelnut, and macadamia farms — most of them worked by family operations and seasonal/contract labor that never register as "employer establishments." Production is far more concentrated than the farm count suggests, though: farms with at least $1 million in total agricultural sales accounted for 1.269 million of the 1.633 million almond acres, 183,223 pecan acres, and 252,373 walnut acres [6].

4. The investable universe

There is no listed pure-play U.S. tree-nut grower. Public exposure is diversified, downstream, or land-based.

For most public investors the cleanest handles are the farmland REITs (LAND, FPI) — which capture orchard land value and rent — and, for downstream demand, processor JBSS. Pricing, yields, dividends, and valuation belong in Section 10. The private/cooperative names above are examples, not a complete ranking.

5. How the money works

Tree nut farming runs on perennial-crop economics, not annual-crop economics. The core grower formula is:

Yield per bearing acre × realized grower price per pound − production and financing costs.

• Long capital cycle. A new orchard costs thousands of dollars per acre to establish, yields a first small crop around year 3–5, and reaches full bearing later. For almonds full bearing arrives around years 6–7 and orchards produce for ~20–25 years; pistachios are slower — a small crop at 5–6 years and full bearing at roughly 10–12 years [23]. Capital is sunk and illiquid — you cannot rotate out of a bad price the way a corn grower can.
• Bearing acres and the crop mix. California's almond bearing acreage is ~1.39 million acres — about 62% of the state's tree-nut acreage, ahead of pistachios (~22%, ~486,000 bearing acres) and walnuts (~16%) [8].
• Growers are price-takers on a global commodity. Almond grower prices swung from ~$4/lb (2014) to a ~$1.40 bottom (2022) and back toward ~$2.40–2.57 in 2024 [12]. Because a large majority of the almond crop is exported (Section 6), world supply/demand and the dollar set the price, not the individual farm.
• Alternate bearing. Pistachios (and to a degree walnuts and pecans) swing between heavy "on" years and light "off" years, so single-year output and revenue are lumpy by nature [24]. Pistachio production value, for example, fell from $2.8 billion in 2023/24 to ~$2.05 billion in 2024/25 after a smaller crop, and 2025's crop of ~1.57 billion pounds was the largest on record [10].
• Pollination. Almonds require insect pollination and depend on managed honeybee hives trucked in at bloom — a real, weather-sensitive cost line; pistachios rely on wind [10].
• Cost structure is water-, labor-, and capital-heavy. A University of California, Davis cost study put almond operating costs at about $3,807 per acre in 2024, up ~69% from 2016, with a break-even near $1.73/lb — and on that math no cumulative break-even until roughly year 12 for a debt-free orchard (later if the land is financed) [13]. Water is the biggest swing cost (Section 7).
• Where margin is captured. Growers sell to handlers/processors who hull, shell, grade, and market the nuts, and receive a price net of those services; cooperative members (Blue Diamond) instead share a pooled return. Processors earn handling fees, processing spreads, quality premiums, and brand margin, and carry substantial inventory between harvests. Vertically integrated players (Wonderful) capture grower and processor and brand margin.
• Land as a second P&L. A large share of long-run return is the appreciation of scarce, irrigated orchard land — exactly the return the farmland REITs are built to harvest (rent plus land value), which is why they favor water-secure permanent-crop ground [18].

Useful metrics differ by role: for growers, yield per bearing acre, realized price/lb, cash cost per acre, water cost and reliability, tree age, and debt-service coverage; for processors, pounds received/processed, kernel recovery, reject rates, gross margin per pound, inventory turns, and customer concentration; for farmland owners, rent coverage, tenant quality, water assets, crop mix, and land values. The through-line: high fixed costs plus a globally set price mean margins swing violently with the commodity cycle, and the decision to plant (or pull) an orchard plays out over a decade — the source of the industry's recurring boom-and-bust.

6. What drives demand

• Health and snacking. Nuts ride the protein / plant-based / better-snacking wave, and almond and other plant "milks" added a large non-snack outlet for almonds. USDA's Economic Research Service (ERS) estimated 2024/25 U.S. per-capita availability at roughly 1.9 lbs almonds, 0.7 lbs pistachios, 0.6 lbs walnuts, and 0.5 lbs pecans [10].
• Pistachios are hot. U.S. pistachio exports hit record levels and the "Dubai chocolate" pistachio craze added visible consumer pull; the U.S. grew about 63% of the world's pistachios in 2024/25 [26].
• Exports are strategic. ERS estimates fruits and tree nuts exported about 44% of production value over 2013–2022, and earlier work found U.S. almond, walnut, pistachio, and hazelnut output each depends on exports for more than half of sales [25][27]. The U.S. supplies roughly a quarter of world tree-nut exports [26]; India (the top almond buyer) and China/Hong Kong are pivotal, which makes trade access a demand lever, not only a risk (Section 7).
• Supply can outrun demand. Nuts are discretionary, and orchards planted years earlier keep producing even after prices weaken. The 2014–2022 almond price crash partly reflected new acreage coming into bearing faster than demand grew — long-term demand is favorable, but the supply base is still expanding.

7. Regulation

• Water — the defining regulation. California's Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), enacted in 2014, requires local agencies to bring high- and medium-priority Central Valley basins to "sustainability" by roughly 2040, tightening pumping year by year [28]. The Public Policy Institute of California estimates 500,000+ acres of Valley farmland fallowed by 2040 [29], and pumping restrictions can add $500–$1,500 per acre to a pistachio grower's costs [30]. SGMA is the single biggest structural force on the industry.
• Federal marketing orders. The USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) runs marketing orders for California almonds (Order 981), pistachios (Order 983), and California walnuts (Order 984) — funding research and promotion, setting quality and reporting rules, and, for pistachios, mandatory aflatoxin testing [31][32][33].
• Food safety and contaminants. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) caps total aflatoxin (a fungal toxin) at 20 parts per billion; pistachio shipments require an aflatoxin certificate, with testing administered by AMS [34]. The FDA's Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) requires covered facilities to maintain hazard-based preventive controls, manage allergens, and keep recall procedures [35]. Tree nuts are also a major allergen under U.S. allergen-labeling law, driving downstream labeling requirements.
• Pesticides, labor, and risk management. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) registers pesticides under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA), with additional California rules; seasonal harvest labor leans on the U.S. Department of Labor's H-2A temporary-agricultural-worker program [36]; and federal crop insurance is available for major tree nuts. Export tariffs (Section 9) are set by trade policy.

8. Competitive dynamics and consolidation

• Fragmented field, concentrated channel. Tens of thousands of growers sell into a handful of handlers/marketers (Blue Diamond, Wonderful, Olam). Processing and branded distribution are concentrated because shelling, optical sorting, pasteurization, storage, export compliance, and customer qualification require expensive infrastructure. JBSS cites raw-material pressure and automation costs as drivers of consolidation among shellers, especially in pecans and walnuts [22].
• The Wonderful advantage. Stewart and Lynda Resnick's private Wonderful Company is the world's largest almond and pistachio grower-processor and controls major water assets (including a Kern Water Bank stake) [13] — a vertical-integration and water moat small growers cannot match.
• SGMA is a consolidation engine. As groundwater tightens, water- and capital-rich operators expand while thinly capitalized or water-short growers exit or fallow ground — concentrating acreage over time [29][30].
• Institutional farmland ownership is rising. Farmland REITs (LAND, FPI) and private farmland managers steadily buy permanent-crop ground and lease it back to operators [18][20], separating land ownership from farming. Durable competitive advantages cluster around water security, orchard scale, low harvest cost, crop quality, grower relationships, processing capacity, food-safety systems, brands, and export-market access.

9. Risks

• Commodity price cycle / oversupply. The core risk. Because planting decisions bear fruit years later, the industry chronically over- or under-plants; the 2022 almond price collapse followed years of aggressive planting [12].
• Water / SGMA. Rising pumping costs and hard acreage limits threaten Central Valley economics for two decades ahead [29][30].
• Weather and biology. Drought, heat, insufficient winter "chill hours," frost at bloom, wildfire, pests, disease, and — for almonds — dependence on managed honeybee pollination all put yields at risk.
• Alternate bearing. Pistachio (and to a degree walnut/pecan) output swings sharply between crop years — pistachio production value fell from $2.8B (2023/24) to ~$2.05B (2024/25) on a smaller crop [10].
• Trade and tariffs. Export dependence cuts both ways. India removed retaliatory almond/walnut tariffs in fall 2023, but new 2025 U.S. tariff actions and retaliation could cost U.S. nut and fruit industries over $3 billion, with pistachios alone facing roughly $384 million at risk [37].
• Input-cost inflation and interest rates. Fertilizer, energy, and labor costs have climbed sharply [13]; higher rates hurt land-levered growers and orchard developers, and processors face large working-capital and inventory-write-down risk.
• Geographic concentration. Almonds, pistachios, and walnuts are overwhelmingly California — a single-region exposure to state water, labor, environmental, and climate policy.

10. How to invest and the outlook

Public-market routes (treat each ticker as a different exposure, not "the tree-nut trade"):

• Farmland REITs — Gladstone Land (LAND) and Farmland Partners (FPI) — own orchard land and collect rent plus appreciation; both pay dividends (LAND pays monthly) and skew toward water-secure permanent crops [18][19][20]. This is the cleanest listed proxy for the land side of the return — rent, water, tenant, interest-rate, and land-value exposure more than pure crop-price exposure.
• Downstream processor — John B. Sanfilippo & Son (JBSS) — branded/snacking demand without orchard price risk, but with raw-material, inventory, retailer, and recall risk [22].
• Diversified land/ag — Tejon Ranch (TRC), Limoneira (LMNR) — nut exposure is real but blended with grapes, citrus, real estate, and other assets; at TRC, farming is a small part of a diversified real-estate business [21].
• Australian pure-play — Select Harvests (SHV) — the only listed almond pure-play, useful as a read-through, but not U.S. and not California-water-exposed.

Private routes.

• Direct orchard ownership, sale-leasebacks, and farmland funds/platforms (e.g., AcreTrader, FarmTogether) plus institutional managers (Nuveen/Westchester, Manulife) that buy permanent-crop ground and lease to operators.
• Cooperative membership (Blue Diamond) — available by farming, not by purchase.
• Private equity / credit in handlers, processors, hulling/shelling infrastructure, and water-secured land — the concentrated, brandable tier of the chain. Diligence should verify water rights, tree age, historical yield, crop contracts, processor access, labor compliance, insurance, debt, environmental liabilities, and exit liquidity.

Near-term drivers (forward-looking). Grower prices have recovered off the 2022 lows but almond supply remains ample, so the near-term almond story is a demand-catch-up story [12][27]. Pistachios look structurally stronger — record exports and a genuine consumer craze against still-growing acreage [10][26]. The dominant long-run swing factor is SGMA: as it forces California acreage down through 2040 it is a threat to individual growers but, by tightening supply, a potential support for prices and for the value of well-watered orchard land [29] — the exact asset the farmland REITs are accumulating. Trade policy is the wildcard that can move a heavily export-dependent industry in either direction in a single season [37].

Base case: durable demand and valuable land, but cyclical and operationally demanding returns. The most attractive opportunities are well-capitalized platforms that combine reliable water, productive orchards, disciplined planting, efficient processing, and strong customer access. Do not underwrite perpetual acreage growth, permanently cheap water, or stable crop prices.

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Sources

1. U.S. Census Bureau. "2022 NAICS Definition: 111335 Tree Nut Farming." 2022. https://www.census.gov/naics/?details=111335&input=111335&year=2022
2. USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS). "Noncitrus Fruits and Nuts — 2024 Summary." May 2025. https://esmis.nal.usda.gov/sites/default/release-files/zs25x846c/mc87rn20c/w37656321/ncit0525.pdf
3. Capital Press (reporting USDA NASS). "U.S. tree nuts, noncitrus fruits see sweet value gains in 2024." 2025. https://capitalpress.com/2025/05/08/u-s-tree-nuts-noncitrus-fruits-see-sweet-value-gains-in-2024/
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5. U.S. Small Business Administration. "Table of Small Business Size Standards" (NAICS 111335 = $3.75 million average annual receipts). 2023. (Histometrics ingested federal ground-truth file, stats-111335.) https://web.data.sba.gov/en/dataset/small-business-size-standards
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15. Setton Farms. "About Setton Farms." https://www.settonfarms.com/
16. J.G. Boswell Company. "Company Overview." https://jgboswell.com/
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18. Gladstone Land Corporation. "Fourth Quarter and Year Ended 2024 Results" and 2025 Form 10-K. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1495240/000149524026000007/land-20251231.htm
19. The Motley Fool. "2 Best Farmland REITs and How to Invest." 2026. https://www.fool.com/investing/stock-market/market-sectors/real-estate-investing/reit/farmland-reits/
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21. U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. "Tejon Ranch Co. 2025 Form 10-K." 2026. https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/96869/000162828026019685/a2025annualreporttoshareho.pdf
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26. USDA Foreign Agricultural Service. "Tree Nuts: World Markets and Trade" (U.S. ~63% of world pistachios 2024/25; ~one-quarter of world tree-nut exports). 2024. https://www.fas.usda.gov/sites/default/files/2024-11/TreeNuts.pdf
27. USDA ERS. "Exports Expand Market for U.S. Food and Agricultural Goods" (fruits and tree nuts ~44% of production value exported, 2013–2022). 2024. https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/charts-of-note/109198
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31. USDA Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS). "981 California Almonds." https://www.ams.usda.gov/rules-regulations/moa/981-california-almonds
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34. USDA AMS / U.S. FDA. "Aflatoxin — Almond, Peanut and Pistachio Approvals" (20 ppb total aflatoxin; pistachio certification). 2024. https://www.ams.usda.gov/services/imports-exports/aflatoxin-almond-peanut-and-pistachio-approvals
35. U.S. Food and Drug Administration. "FSMA Final Rule for Preventive Controls for Human Food." 2015. https://www.fda.gov/food/food-safety-modernization-act-fsma/fsma-final-rule-preventive-controls-human-food
36. U.S. Department of Labor. "H-2A Temporary Agricultural Program." https://www.dol.gov/agencies/eta/foreign-labor/programs/h-2a?lang=en
37. Tridge / UC Agriculture & Natural Resources. "New tariffs could cost U.S. nut and fruit industries over $3 billion." 2025. https://ucanr.edu/blog/anr-news-releases/article/new-tariffs-could-cost-us-nut-and-fruit-industries-over-3-billion